According to Eric Lendrum of American Greatness: “A new survey shows that young Americans who frequently use the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok are much more likely to get their news from content creators rather than actual news outlets.” I am long on record as being an early member of the ban TikTok camp, specifically because no other great power in history would allow an adversary to perform live-action social experiments on its youngest citizens. I read this article about young people viewing CCP propaganda as an alternative to “actual news outlets” and thought “yes that is bad, but what is worse is that this is a battle between the resistable force and the movable object.”
Tag: social media
WordPress.com Reader as Social Media
Blogger Chris Lovie-Taylor wrote about using WordPress Reader as his social network. I am only mildly acquainted with WordPress Reader because it is a part of wordpress.com instead of wordpress.org and both this site and The New Leaf Journal are powered by the WordPress software on a VPS. However, I do have a WordPress.com account and a created a single-page personal feed aggregator site (which could use a touch-up), so I have an idea of how WordPress Reader works. As Mr. Lovie-Taylor explains, you can automatically discover and follow WordPress.com site and add any site with an RSS/ATOM feed to your list of follows. I very much like the concept and appreciate that it allows following non-WordPress.com sites (.org sites can appear with the help of the Jetpack plugin but I am not running Jetpack on either of my sites). What I do not like is that it is tethered to WordPress.com. I think there is an idea here, however, for a “social” media site based on following external sites and sharing posts, maybe even with some Hypothes.is functionality.
Linkedin’s New AI “Features”
I have never used Linkedin. I have also never been tempted to use Linkedin. But what if Linkedin added some new feature to make me sign up? I quote from a report by Mr. Mauricio B. Holguin on AlternativeTo: “LinkedIn has introduced new AI-powered features aimed at improving professional networking, simplifying networking tasks such as making connections, job searching, and content sharing.” While using AI to help guide users’ Linkedin network interactions will surely (operative word) make Linkedin a better (other operative word) place, I will continue to sit on the sidelines.
The Last Bluesky Invites
I decided to request an invite to Bluesky a couple of weeks ago when I saw that it allowed for using one’s own domain as a handle and had RSS support. I finally received my invite on February 4. I made my account, set it up with my domain, and added my Bluesky RSS feed to my feed aggregator site. Two days after I received my invite and made my account, Bluesky announced invite-free sign-ups.
Snapchat Referral to NLJ
My privacy-friendly local page-counting solution for WordPress, Koko Analytics, picked up a referral from snapchat.com over at The New Leaf Journal. Snapchat? Really. I thought this was for sending photos. No no, don’t correct me. I am happy living in ignorance. I will just go on living under my assumption that Snapchat is not the best.
Feeds for Articles Over X and Mastodon
I realized that I had been using Twitter, and now Mastodon, as an information hub rather than a social network. I was following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites; I was following bots to get content from link aggregators. Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for that job.
I came across an interesting passage by blogger Facundo Olano in his blog post about creating a personal feed reader to follow good and meaningful writing from around the web (see the source code for his interesting feed reader project). He assessed his prior usage of Twitter (now “X”) and Mastodon and realized that he was “following people just to get notified when they blogged on their websites,” in effect “following bots to get content from link aggregators.” He concluded that “Mastodon wasn’t the right tool for the job.” I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Olano’s assessment as well as his preference for using personal feed readers to stay abreast of updates from interesting authors instead of social media platforms such as Facebook, X (or Twitter), and even Mastodon. Feeds are the best way for following individual websites and authors (combined with newsletters in some cases). Social media and networking serve different purposes, but I will grant that they can play a limited role in discovering new authors and articles (preferably combined with a read-it-later tool).